I have a plain Debian image I can pop in about 90% of the machines we're removing Win10 from without any hassle. When the hell is the last time you installed Linux?

It's Powershell, it probably takes up 2gb in libraries.

Well, that, and they're likely to start harassing their coworkers, because they have be inculcated with the belief that every utterance that comes from their is not merely profound, but their absolute right to blurt out.

I believe that this round of ARM-PCs is less hostile than the "windows RT" era ones; which were(albeit cracked after some time) basically intended to be NT iPads; but more or less the full UEFI Class 3 device with MS CAs burned in as primary treatment still counts as 'standardized'.

Honestly need to give it a look; thanks to the delightfully tepid reception that Glorious AI PC with Recall received; you can actually get interesting-looking Qualcomm based hardware at attractive prices; and, while the Apple M-series stuff seems to be better, Asahi Linux support is really only there in M1/M2; with M3 and M4 deeply WIP.

I suspect that, even the fully UEFI/ACPI-ified stuff is still at least as eccentric in terms of power management quirks as various x86 vendor laptops are; the standards aren't 100% prescriptive and sometimes the implementations are just garbage that gets papered over with a windows-only driver; but it's not like you are doing a bring-up on some random dev board, at least.

I realize that when you have a product you need to hype the use case; but (even if you do accept the premises, many of them fairly sweeping and drastic, that nodding in agreement with techhead mall cops want you to) this all seems a bit much.

There are certainly exceptions; but it a lot of retail environments your way to the exit and your vehicle takes you past multiple fixed cameras, including ones in the parking area that will let you correlate a person with a car and license plate; unless they really, really, want to extend the distance they have to walk with the stolen goods(and even that mostly just increases the number of different camera operators you'd potentially need to pull tape from).

Are the economics of having some dude live-action-video-gaming a drone really competitive with a boring, but quite mature and commodified, IP camera install?

As with most IT boondoggles, there's plenty of blame to spread around from both the management and consultant side of the transaction. Even where seemingly water tight contracts are in place with KPIs, milestones and penalties, sooner or later the sunk cost fallacy will get triggered. The consultants know this, which is why quotes are largely fictitious.

I don't know what the solution is. Having been on both sides of that coin, I've seen how getting customers to come up with a well-defined spec and resisting inevitable feature creep is insanely hard. From the customer side I've seen how eagerly in a competitive procurement process bidders will say whatever the RFQ/RFP requires, and how hard it is to actually verify claims without making the procurement process even longer.

The real problem here is that governments, and indeed many private organizations, have hollowed their IT departments, basically contracting out pretty much everything to outside consultants and service providers. This means there are few people, or in some cases no one, in house that can actually meaningfully assess bids and quotes. You basically have consultants' sales teams both making the pitch and assessing how great it it is, so that they can say almost anything and the elected officials or civil servants, with no direct knowledge of how complex such projects can be, basically swindled by the false economy of the lowest bid.

They do, sort of. ARM themselves provide the "ARM Base Boot Requirements"; along with the "ARM Base System Architecture Specification" and "Server Base System Architecture" supplement.

Those pretty much do say "use UEFI, look reasonably PC-like"(you don't need to reproduce the utter weirdness of historical x86 peripheral memory mapping under 16MB as though you had genuine parallel ports or anything; but UEFI, ACPI, SMBIOS, device tree); with the BSA and SBSA going into further detail about expected behavior, also mostly aimed at compatibility with PC industry standards along with making authoritative decisions on certain details that you could implement in multiple ways just to add confusion to try to encourage people to not do that, at least not so badly that the HAL can't cover it up.

It's just that, while claiming you do support that and not supporting that is frowned upon, supporting that is optional; unlike some of the ISA stuff where (even if you are licensing a core soft enough to modify) ARM is typically pretty humorless about a given "ARMv8" or whatnot deviating from what "ARMv8" is supposed to mean.

If only because they are working with MS on this, I assume that these Qualcomm ones will be intended for use in BBR and BSAS compliant-ish systems; thought that wouldn't necessarily preclude heavily pro-Redmond secure boot default keying or something; but there is no cavalry coming for embedded ARM stuff in general being a pain.

Apropos of leadership accountability...

You know it's bad when those raging communists at Forbes think that your board structure is just shockingly incestuous.

Is there anything worth pirating? I've rediscovered an old hobby... reading. I'm down to just Prime now because it has the most older British detective shows and period dramas (a bit of a favorite with my partner right now). If it was left to me, I'd simply cancel it all. My last Disney+ subscription went unused for a couple of months, save for my daughter and I watching watching Alien Romulus (what a sad waste that was).

So far as I'm concerned they can raise it to a million dollars a month.

I can see the argument that Nvidia has no obvious advantage in LLMs that would make them want to set up their own operation; it's basically everything else about the situation that would make me jumpy if I had bet on Nvidia.

"Investing $100 billion in OpenAI's spend $100 billion on Nvidia stuff initiative" sounds, at worst, like a slightly more legal version of the trick where you shuffle stock around between business units or stuff the channel and book that as sales because you suspect that your real sales numbers will disappoint; and, even if it's not quite that dire, Nvidia being willing to get paid in faith rather than in other people's money (or shift the stock to one of their customers that actually has money) looks very much like an indirect price cut, which gives the impression that either demand is outright softening, and Nvidia has units that it can't simply immediately shift to customers who are actually paying cash right now; or that Nvidia feels the need to help fill the gap between OpenAI's seemingly unlimited appetite for doubling-down money and the, sooner or later, limited supply of VC nose candy.

That said, it's not entirely novel; Nvidia's current holdings are something like 90% Coreweave(under 10% of Coreweave's total shares; but Coreweave shares are the bulk of other-company shares Nvidia holds); and they have an agreement with them obliging them to purchase any unused capacity through 2032; so they've been expressing confidence in AI-related companies and/or trying to keep the music going by paying some of their more fragile customers' bills even before this.

It could be that Nvidia isn't even trying to diversify; but the history of bad things happening when people underestimate correlated risks also doesn't make me feel great about the situation: Obviously it's going to be a bad day at Nvidia if 'AI' cools; stock price will take a hit and they will be left holding at least some inventory and TSMC and other vendor commitments; but it's going to be a worse day the more of their hardware they sold in exchange for stock in 'AI' Nvidia buyers, rather than in exchange for money, since the fortunes of those companies are going to be fairly closely correlated with Nvidia's own, albeit likely to swing harder and have further to fall.

I get the unpleasant impression that we are doing a corporate reenactment of that period in European history where basically everyone was ruled by Habsburgs who were incestuous and incompetent in equal measure.

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.